What Is Real Happiness?

What Is Real Happiness?

posted by Deepak Chopra

What is real happiness? It is being at one with your soul. So, then what’s a soul? Its everything that the ego is not. The ego tries to build you up. It makes you feel special and protected. But what’s really happening? You wind up being incredible insecure.

“I’m stuck on myself, on my way of doing things. I don’t love the way I am, but I’m addicted to it, and I don’t know how to stop.”

Your soul and your ego are as invisibly mixed as white wine and water. That’s why people are so confused. They wander through life searching for the soul when it’s right there. They all believe their soul will go to Heaven after they die, but the soul is everywhere already.

In other words, the soul is a mystery. It can’t be lost or found. It is neither here nor there. It belongs to you and yet it belongs to God. Without a process, no one would ever get to the bottom of it.

You’re searching for a label. Don’t. The process can’t be named. It’s invisible and yet all-powerful. It alters everything you say and do, yet nothing you say and do is part of it.

You can’t own the process. You can’t cling to it, any more than you could hold on to the smell of the ocean. The process happens entirely in the present. It’s here one second and gone the next.

You keep going back to your old self. That’s the worst addiction. As long as you crave the old self, you can never fully contact the unknown. Everyone is addicted to their old self.

You can’t have real roses, so you buy plastic ones. You can’t think sweet thoughts, so you gobble down sugar. You can’t figure out how to be happy, so you make other people laugh. There’s nothing wrong with what you do, but that’s not real happiness.

Adapted from Why Is God Laughing? The Path to Joy and Spiritual Optimism, by Deepak Chopra (Harmony Books, 2008).

Moon Names for August

Double or treble circles round the moon foreshadow rough and severe storms, and much more so if these circles are not pure and entire, but spotted and broken. - Francis Bacon, English philosopher (15611626) (folklore).From The Old Farmer's Almanac.